Meet the Artist Stuart Jones

ARTIST STATEMENT

The environment and how we experience the landscape interests me and informs my practice. My work explores the human relationship with the landscape and how this is in flux. As we become increasingly disconnected from our environment due to technological advancement, we are in conflict with the natural world due to the way we live. Ideas of utopia, dystopia, heterotopia and the sublime are consistent themes within my practice. The Anthropocene and the climate crisis and current social and political issues feed my thinking.

My paintings consists of layers of oil paint glazes, staining and pouring, spray paint applied with stencils and paint pens on canvas. My process varies and evolves over time but generally starts with drawings, images, and collages that I have manipulated and experimented with: this then forms the starting point for the painting. The human figure is missing from my paintings, enabling the viewer to become the missing human presence within the work, the spaces becoming portals that the viewer has to negotiate into an alternative world, space or time.